Quotes

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

-Aristotle

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I establish yesterday or some previous day.”

-James Joyce

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

-John F. Kennedy

“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.”

-Colin Powell

“Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.”

-Samuel Johnson

“Do the thing you are afraid to do, and the death of fear is certain.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“… we simply become habituated or accustomed to doing things in certain ways. And then, we become sort of spoiled, doing only the things that we like to do, that we are used to doing… by making a steady effort, I think we can overcome any form of negative conditioning and make positive changes in our lives. But you still need to realize that genuine change doesn’t happen overnight.”

-The Dalai Lama

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming. But he who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

-George Eliot

“Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin. Years pass in boredom, but that is okay because when our true love comes around, or we discover our real calling, we will begin. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love would come and go and we wouldn’t even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you and I who would be able to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday – the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness – is where success, let alone happiness emerges… To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-today life so that they are completely natural. Incremental power is kin to water steadily carving stone. Keep flowing when everything is on the line.”

-Josh Waitzkin

“Playing the part of the charitable soul was only for those who are afraid of taking a stand in life. It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we’re not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it’s only at night – when we’re alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep – that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice.”

– Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“Lost time is never found again”

-Benjamin Franklin

“Don’t wait for life to happen, make life happen.”

-Ryan Black

“If you think you’re pushing yourself harder than everyone else, you’re not comparing yourself to the right people.”

-Robert Alexander

“Champions don’t get defeated.”

-Josh Olkowski

Welcome

The Best Me Online is the worlds foremost community for self actualization, with an international membership base spanning several continents. The Best Me is an evolving philosophy that seeks to tap into the essence of what it means to live life to the fullest. Those who pursue this lifestyle are faced with an ongoing quest to refine themselves in all respects, and to transcend personal limitations in the journey towards excellence. The Best Me Online is a community of people who are committed to this task, offering thoughts and advice from their own personal experience. Those involved in the challenge are joined by an innate hunger to transcend the status-quo. The "Best Me" calls into question any and all assumptions involved with what it means to pursue excellence.